Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  David arrived at Christie’s house ashamed of himself and quite miserable, but determined to apologize, to try not to hurt her feelings any more than he probably already had. He hadn’t phoned ahead, but when he pulled into the drive, he could see Christie and Meg Cramer lying on towels beside the pool in Christie’s backyard.

  Since neither of her parents’ cars was in the driveway, he made his way through the gate and around the side of the house, approaching the girls from across the pool. Christie glanced up at him and then lay her face back down on her arms, but Meg drew herself up into a sitting position and began gathering things into her backpack: suntan lotion, a hairbrush, an extra towel. She greeted David with a quick, polite smile, but was on her feet before David had come all the way around the pool. “I’ve got to get home,” she said. “I have to be at work at five.”

  Christie didn’t move or respond, and David was nervous. He sat down on the end of a chaise longue next to Christie’s towel, but he still hadn’t said anything by the time Meg’s car pulled out of the driveway, and neither had Christie.

  When he finally did speak, his voice was too loud in the echoing acoustics of the terrace and pool. “I hope it’s okay that I came by,” he said. The immediacy of his own voice almost made him jump. Christie didn’t reply; her face was turned away from him, her eyes closed. “I mean, I know I haven’t called. I know I’ve been a real shit. I feel awful about what’s happened.” He still hadn’t got his voice modulated, and his words rose hollowly or fell to a mumble.

  “I care about you a lot, Christie. We were together for a long time. But I guess it just isn’t going to work out….” She had opened her eyes and turned her head on her folded arms, and was regarding him with what seemed to him like curiosity. “I know it’s my fault. I didn’t realize,” he went on, “that maybe I’m too much older than you.” She had slowly raised her head and was lying on her side with her elbow bent and her head propped on her hand.

  “Do you think that’s it?” she asked, not at all angrily, but with interest, and David began to feel relieved. He bent toward her, his forearms resting across his knees.

  “Oh, yeah, Christie,” he said, with a kind of muted enthusiasm. “I can see that I might have put too much pressure on you, especially this year.” He was soft-voiced. This was the first year they had had sex together; he thought it was more tactful not to be blatant about it. “We probably shouldn’t have stayed together for so long…. It wasn’t fair….”

  “Really?” Christie asked, with soft curiosity. “I don’t know,” she said, considering it. “I really liked fucking. I thought that was great.” Her voice was uninflected as if she were only stating a fact, and her tone made David unexpectedly defensive and angry.

  “Fucking. God! Give me a break, Christie. I never would have said that. And what do you mean, anyway? You were always totally freaked out for clays! You were always afraid you’d be pregnant even though…” He had raised his voice, and Christie cast a disdainful look over him, interrupting him.

  “I liked having sex with you, I said. I didn’t want to have a baby with you.” She didn’t raise her voice, but she sat up slowly and looking at him appraisingly. “And, you know, I don’t feel great about what’s happened either.” Her tone was almost dismissive. “I don’t think two years is really all that much difference in age. But mostly I just feel so embarrassed for you.”

  David stood up, and Christie got up, too, shaking out her towel and folding it with calm deliberation. David had meant to be repentant; he hadn’t intended to be furious. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Oh, it’s just that it’s really terrible to see you… I mean, I’ve cared about you for a long time….” and for a moment Christie seemed about to lose her poise. She paused and bent to pick up her sunglasses, and then straightened and gazed kindly at David and continued what she was saying. “I can’t help it. I feel humiliated for you that everyone knows about you and Netta Breckenridge. Now that’s a pretty big difference in age. I mean, what is she? Thirty? God, David, she has a little girl!”

  David was enraged, and at the same time he knew he had no right to be. He hadn’t even known that Christie knew anything about him and Netta. He had no idea that Christie had driven through Netta’s parking lot night after night, and gone home and wept after seeing his car there. David didn’t even understand that he was suddenly humiliated for himself, but all at once Christie understood it as she watched his expression become beleaguered. She crossed the carefully matched blue slate of the terrace, and put her arms around David’s waist and pressed her face against his chest, and he automatically put his hands on her shoulders.

  She had hoped for and rehearsed her part in this confrontation for weeks, but now she gave up her guise of aloofness. “I mean more to you than you think,” she said. Her voice lost any pretense of neutrality as David stood there gently grasping her shoulders. He was so young that he didn’t even understand that in this conversation Christie had nothing to lose.

  “You are going to miss me,” she said. “It’s going to be harder on you than you have any idea, and you’re wasting all the time we have left this summer because you think Netta Breckenridge is really interested in you. That makes you feel great, doesn’t it? Shit, you feel so mature!”

  She was crying, but he just stood there, waiting to leave. He felt terrible, almost sick, and angry and horrified, but he didn’t move. He was paralyzed by his inability to control the consequences of his actions that were let loose over the rippling water of the long, blue pool.

  “David. Oh, David. Don’t you even know that Owen Croft spends almost every night there? Don’t you know he’s practically living with Netta Breckenridge? Everybody knows that. So why are you interested in her? She’s not even pretty. She’s not even nice!”

  David stood frozen in place for a moment. Then he put Christie aside, moving her away from him in the same way he would move a piece of furniture, and turned and left through the gate in the backyard.

  If there were not many people around, Martin generally paused to let Duchess off her leash near the two mysterious and modest gravestones just beyond the parking lot of the Freund Museum before taking his usual route up Bell’s Hill. Duchess would dash frantically after the squirrels who leaped ahead of her from tree to tree, and Martin could take the steep grade unencumbered until Duchess, realizing he had gone ahead, came after him at a desperate gallop. He waited for her now, though, and stood in the late August afternoon, regarding the small grave markers while Duchess made ecstatic forays into the underbrush, rustling and barking enthusiastically when she flushed a squirrel into the high treetops where it sat scolding her.

  The inscriptions had nearly been worn away by tourists who made rubbings even though there was nothing unusual about the markers themselves, except their unexplained location. Martin had asked about them once at the museum, and had been directed to the public library, but he hadn’t pursued it, so perhaps even their location and the discrepancy in the dates of their deaths were perfectly reasonable.

  Lydia

  dau. of

  S. A. and N. A.

  Williams

  died June 22, 1878

  aged

  2 years and 6 months

  Henry

  son of

  Garland and Emma Meeck

  died July 2, 1815

  aged 2 yr. 4 mo.

  In life beloved

  Though dead remembered

  As always, he regarded the little graves with a degree of awe and a great deal of respect, but he was so familiar with them that they no longer filled him with melancholy. Had these children lived out their full life spans, they would not be alive today, so the white rounded stone of the child Lydia and the age-softened rectangular marker of the boy Henry were solemn monuments to lives long past. Their existence predated Martin’s memory; and when Duchess caught up with him, he began the gradual climb up the rise of the hill and put the two children out of his mind.

&n
bsp; Martin prided himself on his own good nature, unaware that he sometimes used his amiability as a way to keep casual friends at arm’s length. He preferred to approach those loose-knit friendships at an angle to spare himself the discomfort of facing any conflict of taste or opinion with someone who was less than dear to him. But he had been forced into an uncomfortable state of intimacy with Netta, and he had no idea how to discourage it. He had been uneasy about her ever since the evening they had spent polishing the last bit of her article before The Review went to press. He was especially distressed, since he knew from Vic that David was involved with Netta one way or another.

  As he descended Bell’s Hill, he tried to put the incident out of his mind, but he was filled with distaste nonetheless. When Vic had told him that David was spending a lot of time with Netta, Martin had chosen not to consider the implications too closely. Martin himself had seen David and Anna Tyson coming out of Berkshire Video with a cassette, walking together down a little alley off Carriage Street. David had been bending slightly over the little girl, holding her hand, looking out for her, and in retrospect their alliance seemed alarming. It made Martin think that David could be involved in a dangerous encompassment. Netta’s peculiar notions of benevolence—her methods of extending charity—might be perilous to David.

  Duchess dragged Martin along once he had snapped her back on her leash, and when he let her loose at the corner of the yard, she headed straight for the garden in a delighted rush. He trotted after her, calling her back, hoping to stop her before she got into the flowers or crushed the strawberries, but she came to a stop on the grass at the bottom of the yard, wagging her tail tentatively. By the time Martin reached her, he saw that David was in the garden, although his back was to Martin. He was standing upright and still. Martin stepped over the border of marigolds before he realized that David must have heard him, but hadn’t turned to greet him. Martin stood still, too, straddling the row of flowers.

  “Hey, David,” he said. “Can I talk to you a minute?”

  David didn’t answer and didn’t turn around. “Sure,” he said finally, still not facing his father but stooping down to the strawberries, ruffling his hand among their leaves to search out the berries.

  “I just want to talk with you about Netta Breckenridge.” Martin’s voice was light in an attempt not to sound advisory. In an attempt not to be interfering in David’s life. “She’s a complicated sort of personality,” he said genially, as though he were settling in for a discussion, perhaps, of her endearing idiosyncracies. “I mean, you may not know…”

  David was crouched among the strawberries; but his hands were clenched on his knees, and Martin fell silent as David stood up slowly and turned around. Martin had never seen David look as bleak or as stricken as he did just then. His lower lip was tucked in at the corners and his eyebrows were raised in an expression of anguished surprise, as though he had had the breath knocked out of him. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, and it was clear at once that David already knew more than Martin could ever have told him. And it was surprising to Martin that he had forgotten that David could feel such anguish. He had grown used to accepting his son’s contentment at face value; it had not occurred to Martin in years that David might need championing.

  “I’m sorry, David.” Martin looked away and extricated himself carefully from the bed of marigolds. “Okay, then.” Martin paused on the grass at the verge of the garden, but David didn’t look at him. “I’m going in to get a quick shower. Your mother’s home…” and he turned away and climbed the stepping-stones up the steep yard. As he neared the back door, he decided that he didn’t want to sort all this business out right now, he didn’t want to explain it to Dinah, and he veered off around the side of the house and angled across the front lawn. When Duchess came scuffling after him, he looked down and realized that he was still holding her leash in his hand. He stopped just long enough to snap it onto her collar.

  All day long Dinah had been feeling relaxed and at ease. She had been afloat in the image of David’s continued presence in the town of West Bradford, buoyed by the idea of her family continuing on the way it always had, without the disruptive prospect of any more departures. In fact, she had been thinking how pleasant it would be when the four of them, in the fall, drove out to the orchard where they bought cider and apples and home-baked pies—David liked the Macouns, and Sarah preferred Northern Spies, so they made up a bushel of half of each. Dinah forgot that for the past two years only Sarah had gone with them, and they had simply brought apples back for David. She was also looking forward to fall because the humidity this August afternoon was oppressive, and she anticipated with pleasure the crisp days of late September and October. She had come upstairs to brush her hair and pin it up to get it off the back of her neck. When she looked away from the mirror, she caught sight through the window of David and Martin chatting in the garden. When Martin turned and left, Dinah sat back in her chair and continued watching her son in his garden.

  The other day Ellen had brought by a new book translated from the Chinese that she wanted Dinah to read. One of the greatest pleasures of their friendship was sharing books, but Dinah had been so distracted these past few days that she had only picked it up one evening and begun to thumb through it from back to front, the way she usually read magazines. She had been struck by an italicized poem or song that had caught her eye on the last page:

  A woman is the most lovable thing on earth,

  But there is something that is more important.

  Women will never possess the men they have created.

  It had infuriated her when she had read it, although she had no idea in what context it existed. But as she watched David tending the strawberries, she realized that the poem—intentionally or not—was sad, a piteous lament, in fact, in its seeming bravado. It struck her just then how humiliating it might be to be male, forever indebted to a female because of the simple event of his own birth. How terrible it must feel to be powerless against that inescapable burden of gratitude which one could never incur oneself—a primal offense to one’s dignity. She was appalled at the idea of her own son humbled in such a way.

  The thought only flashed through her mind—one of those slippery ideas that she might examine more carefully someday. It did, however, disturb her mood of optimism, and she watched David carefully as he made his way along the row of strawberries, legs spraddled in his old jeans, and swinging laboriously from the waist to gather the fruit in an odd, disconsolate rhythm.

  The humidity was so high that the condensation on the glass through which she watched him was like a sheen of sorrow over her idea of him in relation to his garden. She thought of the solitary quality of his toil there, the melancholy determination that wouldn’t so much ground him in reality, as she had hypothesized, but would quite possibly quench him. She knew just then that it was time for him to leave.

  She realized simultaneously that eventually his absence would seem a natural condition of the world to her. She could even anticipate that eventually his homecomings, although always longed for, might be disruptive, even intrusive in her life. He would return as a visitor, as company. What she couldn’t imagine, looking out of the blurred, moisture-beaded window, was the way in which she and Martin would lead their lives after the departure of their children.

  Franklin M. Mount

  Dean of Freshmen

  Harvard College

  12 Truscott Street

  Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

  Dear Mr. Mount,

  My father had an interesting solution to what he perceived as the problem of deciding whom he did and did not love. If he felt sure that—in the path of an oncoming bus—he would leap to his death in order to heave some other person out of its way to his or her safety, well, then, that was a person he loved. Over the years the number of people for whom he would be willing to make this last sacrifice shrank rather alarmingly, and oddly enough, he kept me posted about this.

  Struck off th
e list, eventually, were his mother and father, his siblings, and, I suspect, though he may have been too tactful to say so, he was willing to abandon my mother to her own devices in oncoming traffic. But my brother and I—there was never any question. We made his short list. And do you know that it never once occurred to me to wonder if I would risk my own life to put my father out of harm’s way? And, of course, I wouldn’t have. Not for a minute. And it would have been an unnatural instinct if I had felt otherwise.

  I’ve been thinking about you and how you must feel about your daughter. I’m going to tell you something, Frank, that you won’t believe until it’s too late for you, but none of all this new earnestness in child care makes any difference at all. As long as you don’t bear your daughter actual malice, she’ll be just fine. Don’t worry about whether she was breast- or bottle-fed! Put her in day care or don’t put her in day care! Let her watch television all day, or read educational books to her and refuse to have a TV set in your house. Give her nothing but organically grown food, or let her exist on peanut butter and marshmallow fluff.

  Not that I think you should abandon good habits. Of course not. But my point is that since you are always going to be willing to push her out of the way of that bus, all this other effort you’re expending won’t be met or remembered with any gratitude. I know that’s not the point—I know that’s not why you’re making the choices you’re making, but unless you’re a saint you’re going to resent it when you’ll only be to her—trivial! No—you’ll be one of those extraneous people your own parents are to you.

  Oh, Frank, it will shock you so much that when she grows up and leaves home she will resent the fact that it took effort to keep her alive. She won’t care about that; all your efforts will have seemed to her only reasonable. And the hardest thing about it all is that you’ll know she’s absolutely right. If she’s fond of you, then you’ve been a good parent. But if you’re too much on her mind, if she’s indebted, if she’s bound to you, then you will have failed. My husband and I have been as good parents as we knew how, but I’m finding that for the time being it’s a bitter victory.